Hip Hop
topic on 4 shows · 10 statements across 10 episodes
the Knowledge Project 
Masters of Scale 
David Senra 
the a16z Podcast
10 statements about Hip Hop, every show
Freston: MTV Brought Hip-Hop to American Living Rooms Before BET or Radio
“We kind of made up for that, and we were the first people to kind of give hip-hop put it in the living rooms of America. I mean, BET or in radio wasn't even playing hip-hop, but”
Rubin: Lack of recording expertise preserved authentic early hip-hop sound
“The fact that I didn't know what I was doing allowed it to be true to what hip hop was. Whereas all of the records that were coming out, the few and far between, 12 inch singles every few weeks, they were made by professionals who made other kinds of music. Th…”
Lütke: Hip-hop was the first music genre to dominate Shopify
“Like, it was the first category of music that just, like, killed it on Shopify.”
Horowitz: AI is a fantastic creative tool for hip-hop artists
“Particularly the hip-hop guys are interested because it's almost like a replay of what they did, right? They just took other music, and they kind of built new music out of it, and I think that, you know, AI is A fantastic creative tool for them. It, like, way …”
Anish Acharya: AI models cannot invent new musical genres like hip-hop
“If you trained, you know, a model with all the music, you know, up until, but just prior to hip hop, would it, like, infer hip hop? I don't think so, because music is the intersection of past music and culture is critical to it. So you sort of need something t…”
Horowitz: AI music reanimation won't stifle creativity, similar to hip-hop sampling
“I don't think so because you know, like, look, if you don't have a new novel way to do something or create art, then sure, that's going to be better than what you do. But like, if you look at hip hop, You know, they kind of brought James Brown back to life you…”
Rey Flemings: Hip-hop lyrics shifted from communal focus to individualistic wealth obsession
“The music, even in early hip hop, was we-centric.
It was looking out at the world, like,
And at some point that changed, and all of the lyrics became me, how much I've got, how much money, look at me, da da da da, me.
And, you know, that me-centric thinking is…”
Doug E. Fresh: Hip-hop originated from Caribbean sound crew traditions
“A lot of people don't know hip hop started from the foundation of this platform. So when we did jams outside, a lot of those were done because of the, you know, the basic Principles of the way it was done in the Caribbean.”
Dapper Dan: Hip hop will eventually morph into a new platform
“Now, you know, every 20 or 30 something years, we get a powerful cultural platform. You know, we've had jazz, calypso, Rock and roll. All these powerful platforms by which the whole world embraces our music that we can take advantage of, but they don't last fo…”
Horowitz: Hip-hop is uniquely capitalistic and a perfect analog to entrepreneurship
“And it's very specific to hip hop for me and hip hop is an unusual music form in that it's a very Kind of capitalistic form of music, which is completely kind of unheard of in popular music in that the main theme of hip hop, if you go through all the great rap…”